I first saw his movies on TV when I was a teenager. I grew up in a small town in the north and the only place you could see them was on television. Then, when I was 24 or 25, around the time of his 70th birthday, I made two documentaries about him and was able to spend quite a lot of time in Sweden. I watched all his films - which then numbered almost 50. I had written him a letter asking if we could make a documentary based on his book. When I met him, he said one of the reasons he had agreed to see me was that in Christmas in Sweden, there is a tradition of farcical comedy and one of the characters in it is called Mr Winterbottom. I was told you had to be extremely punctual - that that was an issue. So I was.

There's a simplicity about his films. They're very beautiful, very well acted, but at the heart of it is a very simple approach to film-making, an idea that if you record things honestly enough and in enough detail, even in situations that seem undramatic, there will be the ability to move people and show what is going on behind the surfaces. You're talking about somebody who was making great films in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and into the 80s. It's an amazing body of work. In a sense, his career and way of making films got simpler and simpler. He tried to get rid of anything unnecessary and focus on the essential. It's easier to borrow from his way of working than from his films themselves. You just can't beat his films; no one can copy them.

Woody Allen Director: Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Match Point

I don't remember having seen the very early Bergman films. I saw Summer with Monika, it was wonderful! And then I saw The Naked Night, and that was the one that completely captivated me. It was tremendous. Then there was a rush of Bergman's films in the US. Wild Strawberries came over and The Seventh Seal and The Magician, and he made a very big reputation in the arthouses here. This was in the 1950s.

To me, the Bergman style began to gel with Summer with Monika. Before that, the films he was making were like very good American films. But there seemed to be some kind of break with Monika, and after that it drifted into the emergence of that great poetic style. When the area of concern in cinema shifted from the external world to the internal, Bergman developed a grammar, a vocabulary to express these inner conflicts brilliantly. Part of this grammar was the use of the close-up in a way it hadn't been used before. Very close and very long, long, long static close-ups. The effect is so exciting because it's infused with his special genius.

I never had any contact with him until I was filming Manhattan. We had a long conversation and it was very pleasant. I was very surprised that many of the trivial things I went through, he had also gone through at the exact same time. He said to me that when a film of his comes out, the production people call him immediately and report. "Well, the first showing was full, and we predict it's going to make more money than any film of yours has done." And this happens to me too. The same kind of predictions. It all looks great, and then after five days it vanishes.

I don't want to get into the situation so many of my contemporaries are in, where they make one film every few years and it's a Big Event. That's why I always admired Bergman. He'd be working quietly on the island and would make one little tiny film and put it out, and then he'd be working on the next one. The work was important. Not the eventual success or failure, the money or the critical reception.

Liv Ullmann Actor: Persona, Cries and Whispers, Saraband

Saraband is autobiographical in that Bergman had a son who died before they got to make up. That was horrible for him. You would think this film would be everything he would like to say - I love you, I care for you, etc - but in the film it's still as if they can't talk. That is very brave. He is saying this is who I am; this is my music and I am going to play it again and again. I am sure that much of the film has to do with the wife, Ingrid van Rosen, whom he lost 10 years ago, but also it has to do with the idea that for some people, the easiest person to love is someone who has gone. But the picture of the dead wife in the film is not of Ingrid. It's a lady who works in costumes.

When shooting on Saraband was over, Bergman said goodbye and went to his island. That was two years ago. He lives there absolutely completely alone. I was there a month ago for a few days. Some of his children come there in the summer, but he doesn't have visitors. He listens to music and reads books. We made Scenes From a Marriage 30 years ago in a stable he had made into a studio. Now, he has made that into a cinema. He gets all the films sent there. He sits there with this woman who keeps cows and horses showing her films. Every new film. He knows everything that is being made.

When I was directing Faithless, Erland Josephson and I made a little video film for fun about our characters from Scenes From a Marriage. We sent it to him, and I think that's when he had the idea to use the same characters again. But Saraband is not Scenes From a Marriage 30 years on. And I don't think it belongs to Faithless, which was a much more forgiving film. Saraband is a film that does not forgive.

Mike Hodges Director: Get Carter, Croupier

As a young man, you spent pretty well the whole night after you had seen The Seventh Seal discussing it. It was a very enigmatic film and you didn't have many films that were contemplating death and what happens after - those metaphysical questions. You still don't. With Fellini gone and Tarkovsky gone, he is the last from that great era of film-making. I did go off Bergman around the time of Serpent's Egg. His films seemed to take a deeply morbid path and I suppose I had had enough of that. I got to a point where his films didn't seem that interesting to me, but then I went back to him again when I saw Persona, which was absolutely extraordinary. I got to work with Max von Sydow on Flash Gordon. He had a great sense of humour, much to my surprise. I'm dying to see Saraband.

Thomas Vinterberg Director: Festen, Dear Wendy

At film school, we did a Bergman course where we saw his first 12 films. Then, later on, I saw Fanny and Alexander and some of the more popular ones. I could tell this was a film-maker who was fantastically precise, with deep psychology, and that he was giving me insight into human beings I hadn't seen before. Some of those close-ups of those beautiful Swedish actresses have just stayed with me. He created female characters you fell in love with instantly and exposed their burning inner life in a way I have not seen before or since.

After I made Festen, I called him. He was very, very lively, speaking from his island. I was expecting to hear from a more bitter man. He said he would do no more work and now he would find the time to sit in a corner in his house and read some of those marvellous books he never got to read. He told me Festen was a masterpiece, which I was very happy about, but he talked about how silly and stupid Dogme was. We invited him once to do a Dogme film, but he didn't want to do it. I tried to explain why Dogme wasn't silly, but I very quickly gave in. He wasn't going to change his opinion, no matter what I said. I've only talked to him on one occasion. It was so uplifting. If I can feel like he does at that age, life isn't that bad.

Alexander Payne Director: About Schmidt, Sideways

I am woefully underexposed to Bergman. Loved Summer With Monika years ago and have great affection for Wild Strawberries, an influence on About Schmidt. But have you seen The Seventh Seal lately - the film we all thought was so cool in university? It's unwatchable and laughable now. Interesting how that works. Last year I played the game of what movies you are most secretly embarrassed to have never seen. Fanny and Alexander is still one of mine. So you see, I'm not really the guy to ask about Bergman.

Terence Davies Director: Distant Voices Still Lives, House of Mirth

There are certain stories in the Bergman canon that I don't believe. I don't believe The Silence. I don't believe The Seventh Seal. But as soon as I see that opening scene from Cries and Whispers, I am absolutely hooked. When the sister is dying from what is obviously cancer, I find it very hard to watch because my father died of stomach cancer at home. He was screaming like that virtually all the time. It's very, very hard to watch because it opens up those memories. But there are other elements in it which are equally frightening. There is that mixture of the dread of death and oblivion and of religion, which says that oblivion is not the case. When she is dead, the actual body seems to come to life - that is terrifying. My father's body was in the house for 10 days before he was buried. It was horrible - that smell of death which is sweet and unpleasant. Equally, the clergyman in Fanny and Alexander is so frightening. Thinking about it, I go cold because of the terror of the power of religion, especially when it is in the hands of someone who is vicious. Those things you can respond to. At his best, Bergman touches on those universals of joy and terror.

I first became aware of his work when I was a teenager. If you're a cinephile, anti-social freak as I was, Bergman was pretty much your common vocabulary with all the other cinephile, anti-social freaks. The Virgin Spring locked me in. I felt great excitement years later when I saw Wes Craven's first movie, Last House on the Left, and realised it was a remake. People forget just how visceral a film-maker Bergman is. You think of the more symbolist films like Seventh Seal, but the fact is that this guy was a master of things we associate with the Hollywood canon, like screen violence.

Ang Lee and I have had lots of discussions about films like Virgin Spring and Wild Strawberries. When I think of Ang's work, I see a lot of Wild Strawberries in there. For me, there were no troughs in Bergman's work. I even like From The Life of the Marionettes. I teach film history and theory at Columbia, and some of the films you would think the most dated are the most timely. I screen Persona every year. It is unbelievably timely - that confrontation of European high culture with American imperialism. It is shockingly emotional and present to my students today.

There are two kinds of Bergman influence on US cinema. There's the influence on Woody Allen, where he gets people to stage themselves in depressing situations with lighting reminiscent of Sven Nykvist. That's probably a little bit of a cliche. But there's another influence I would trace more through people like John Cassavetes, with that kind of naturalism and getting inside intimate relationships. Look at Scenes From a Marriage and then look at Love Streams.

Stephen Woolley Producer: The Crying Game; director: Stoned

Bergman has had an influence on everyone who loves movies simply because his films are so incredible. That exploration of the inner soul sounds so cold and boring and pretentious, but films like Persona are just staggering. I can't think of a single other film-maker whose movies you would want to see every day and forever. When I was a kid, I did a film course. It was my first introduction to the National Film Theatre and I saw Wild Strawberries. I was a teenager, about 14, and it was the first grown-up film I had seen - a meditation on life and death, God, and what it's all about. As a kid, it was quite impressive, even if much of it did go right over my head. When you're a teenager, you want to see all the great comedies and all the great westerns. To suddenly see this film was the beginning of my awareness of European cinema. It made me aware of cinema as being above and beyond genre. The films he made 50 years ago are still as fresh as ever.

Sally Potter Director: Orlando, Yes

The first of Bergman's films that totally got me was Persona. It was the mixture of dealing with film material as film combined with this incredible psychological depth. It was a hot, passionate involvement set in this cold northern light. There is this emotional game of chess he is playing with his characters. There is a fascination with and compassion for the female characters. When I was a teenager, I never felt these were women like me, but that didn't matter.

In the 70s, I grew extremely fond of his movies. I had a passion for his work, but it was undifferentiated from my passion for modern cinema. For me, the defining moment with Bergman was when I made my second film, A Winter's Child, and realised that what interested me in film was filming actors. I became fascinated with the process of what was happening on the face. I had a vague notion that this had something to do with Bergman. There was something in his work that spoke directly to me in terms of the intimacy of his writing and the way he used semi- autobiographical elements. Any film-maker trying to get into the texture of human relations ends up in Bergman territory. What I learned from Bergman is that you can explore human relationships with a certain level of brutality and crudity as long as you love your characters.

When I did Conversations with Bergman it was an extraordinary experience for a young film-maker to be confronted with one of the great masters. It's a strange situation when you meet a great artist who uses his own life as his tool. I had seen so many of his films. I had read his autobiography and many articles. He had expressed in his own movies and writing so much of the person he is, and often in such brutal terms. When he was telling me things, it was all so familiar. The person is so much like whatever he has expressed in his work that you don't know what more you can ask him. He has already told you in his art much more than you could imagine interviewing him about. It's both a fascinating and disturbing experience.

This is fragile ground but I think that his film-making is somehow determined by some sexual impulse. At some point, the nature of his inspiration changed. He became more reflexive, more interested in the past. After Fanny and Alexander, I think he considered his movie-making days were over and that he was just going to sit back and be the spectator of his own posterity. He was analysing his work as a film-maker from the exterior. He felt alien to the way cinema was evolving. But I was totally convinced this would become unbearable and that he would start making films again. To me, Saraband is like some other-worldly masterpiece.

· Saraband is released on October 7. All interviews by Geoffrey Macnab, except Woody Allen, which is taken from Woody Allen on Woody Allen (Faber)